Tag Archives: Free jazz

The formal birth of the movement cool took place in 1948 with the publication of the album Birth of the Cool of Thousands Davis, the whole manifesto autodefinitorio and one of the most influential recordings of the history. The new style was stemming straight from the bebop, but it was turning out to be a more cerebral music, which took as a main target the establishment of a “calm” ambience and “meditative”. The cool jazz turned out to be particularly popular between white musicians like Lennie Tristano, partly for its alienation of the African roots of the jazz, but also it found a hollow between the preferences of black musicians who were happening of being simple entertainers to adopt a more active and serious role in the search of its identity musical. Thousands Davis, who had begun its career with Charlie Parker, there gave beginning to the movement with Birth of the Cool (1948), the first one of a series of albumes-Walkin (1954), Thousands (1955), Cookin’, Relaxing, Working or Steaming, all of (1956 – that the bases of the style were sitting. The Modern Jazz Quartet – originally the rhythmic section of Dizzy Gillespie, integrated by Milt Jackson, John Lewis, Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke – published Modern Jazz Quartet with Milt Jackson (1953), Modern Jazz Quartet Volume 2 (1953), and Django (1956), where they were presenting its elegant compositions, in the limit between the baroque thing and the jazzístico. Gunther Schuller was the official initiator of the third stream, a current that was establishing a bridge between the classical music and the jazz, which takes its Jazz Abstractions (1959) as a paradigmatic example, and which counts also between its main representatives Bob Graettinger.

The bop evolved very quickly during the fifties and some musicians (George Russell or Charles Mingus between they) developed, from the concepts of intuition and digression that the musician of Lennie Tristano had announced, formulations similar to those who had already happened in the classical music in the twenties, with the irruption, for example, of the atonalidad in the jazz of the sixties. It is generally accepted by the criticism that, to the margin of the already said precedents, the free jazz takes nature letter in, with the publication of the disc namesake of Ornette Coleman and its double quartet, which supposes a stylistic revolution in the jazz, but “not only that, but a putting in crisis, a rereading and a virtual overcoming of everything what had been the jazz, questioning the sociocultural essentials so much like its historical development”. Coleman had already edited previously some discs that were anticipating this explosion, as The Shape of Jazz to Eats or This Is Our Music, both for Atlantic Records.